The Sociology of Beauty

BEAUTY, an ERC project led by Professor Giselinde Kuipers, studies how beauty standards are socially shaped. In particular, it focuses on the modelling industry - an institution centrally concerned with the production and dissemination of beauty standards - in order to identify the central mechanisms through which such standards are developed and disseminated.

Now imagine a corporate group working hard for setting the next trends for the modelling industry, add a group of angry, anti-system students who have decided to change the way the industry is oppressing us with beauty diktats... this webcomic will make the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic worlds collide to highlight their similarities as well as their contradictions.

Prof. Giselinde Kuipers (researcher)

Kuipers is a professor of cultural sociology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She studied cultural anthropology at Utrecht University, with a brief stint at the University of Seville in Spain. In 2001, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology (with distinction) from the University of Amsterdam. Before taking up her current position, Kuipers worked in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Amsterdam, spent a year as visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA, and was a postdoc at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). In 2010, she received a Starting Grant from the ERC.
giselinde.nl

Francesca Protopapa (artist)

Born in Rome, Protopapa draws cardboard chimeras under the pseudonym of Pistrice, the name of her favorite sea monster. The woman is her privileged subject; pleasure, desire and sensory pleasures are the essence of her work. She works also as graphic designer on cultural communication projects and in 2011 notably founded an association for the promotion of young illustrators named Squame.
pistrice.com

Eleonora Antonioni (artist)

Antonioni was born in Rome in 1983. In 2002/2005 she attended the International School of Comics, focusing on illustration and comics since that time. Among her clients are Rcs libri, Einaudi Ragazzi/Edizioni EL, Sinnos, ELI/La Spiga, Elle Magazine, and Babbel. She currently lives and works in Turin (Italy)
eleonora-antonioni.com